A first look at Fedora

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I installed Fedora 10 on my Macbook last night/this morning. Here's my experience so far:

The Fedora installer (Anaconda) sucks at partitioning. Really badly. It couldn't handle the Mac HFS+ partitions, so I had to first use Ubuntu to get a partition Anaconda could handle. So I told Anaconda to resize Ubuntu's ext4 partition and install to the free space. (Incidentally, Anaconda did not give me the option to format to ext4, even though Fedora 10 supposedly allows this option). It appears that Anaconda's partitioner corrupted the filesystem on Ubuntu's partition, because it no longer shows up in my boot menu and Fedora can't mount that partition. Which means that after an entire day of installing Ubuntu and all my apps for it and tweaking it just the way I like it, it's gone. I'm hoping that I'm wrong and Fedora just overwrote my bootloader, but it looks like I might have a reinstall in my future.

Aside from that, Fedora is fairly nice. It has a good, clean implementation of GNOME with a much sexier default theme than Ubuntu's. It seems pretty fast, and has low memory usage. The package management options provided in Anaconda were excellent. My trackpad mostly works out of the box, though I currently lack right-click options. I haven't done much configuration yet, so I'm sure a solution to this will be found soon. The desktop effects enabled as options in the default install are good- not overdone like my typical Compiz setup, but understated and classy. I have wobbly windows and a desktop cube, so I can live without windows bursting into flames.

I was expecting installation of my Broadcom wifi driver to be filled with ndiswrapper fun and a painful process, since the Fedora release notes makes clear their strong stance against proprietary drivers and even against ndiswrapper. However, it turned out just to be a matter of enabling a non-free repository and yum-ing the driver. Slightly more work than Ubuntu's pop-up "Do you want to use non-free drivers?" but still much easier than my first experience with Linux wifi.

So, it's mostly an out-of-the-box experience, and it's pretty decent overall. The add/remove feature is intuitive, although the repos are not as extensive as I'm used after coming from Debian-style distros. Seems to be a very solid distro and I'm looking forward to seeing more of what it has to offer.

I got Ubuntu back on. Its partitioner knows how to play nice with other operating systems. So my tri-boot is working fairly well.

Fedora is fairly similar in terms of after-installation configuration. Getting flash support wasn't difficult, and my trackpad is now working perfectly. (Incidentally, I finally actually read a man page while setting up my trackpad configuration) My webcam still gives a greenish tint, but that bug is in Ubuntu too.

I'm liking Fedora so far, and may end up migrating to it away from Ubuntu. It seems somewhat more stable.

Whoa, fedora's already on 10? It doesn't seem like many years ago, when I used Fedora 5 (it was the newest version at the time) and it was my first distro because I was just starting to use linux. I don't remember much about it because I was just learning Linux at the time, but I don't think I had many problems with it. I might have to dual-boot Fedora with my Gentoo once I get acquainted with Gentoo. Then again, I might just install it on VirtualBox.

Actually, it should be on 11 by now, but the latest release has been delayed several times. It should be out next week, though.

If you get something like Gentoo running, I'm not sure what the point of installing Fedora would be. It seems to me the purpose of distros like Ubuntu and Fedora is to provide a good, out-of-the-box working system that you don't have to spend hours configuring. Once you've spent all that time and effort setting up a more complex distro, you'd probably prefer that over the more n00b-friendly preconfigured options.

I downloaded RH 9 about 5 years ago (or so it seems). We set up an old Pentium II with it, and it worked ok, but we couldn't figure out how to make it a server (granted, neither me nor the other tech knew bupkis about Linux). The GUI worked, I tried a linux version of a program I use, a modeler called Wings 3d, that worked ok.

I did take a course on Linux back in '04, but it was not much help at the time. May go back and take some others. There's a RHSA cert, but if it's anything like MCSE or CCNA, it's probably out of my price range.

The only problem was that you had to pay (dearly, I imagine) for tech support. nowadays, there may be some free support for it. I'll probably convert this machine in July (have to back off about 40 programs and over 100,000 files..., but I'll try Ubuntu first.

^ You have to pay for support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is based on Fedora. Fedora is a community distro and you get support the same way you do in Ubuntu- just check the forums and the community-provided documentation.

well, that's what happens when I don't constantly check the state of things... The impression was you get the source code for free, but you had to shell out if you had any questions.

Technically, if I want to get a job in Linux, Red hat's supposed to have more than half (depending on who you ask... of the market.

Even in '04, just getting tie .iso files down took the better part of a week. I did get a free version of RH8 with the text book. Wonder if there's an upgrade, or you have to go the Apple route (blow it up and start over...j/k..

Aha! I found out how to get the fn behavior I want, and actually in an easier manner than the process was in Ubuntu.

Well, that's it, the last of my necessary tweaking. I now have Fedora set up as a full system exactly as I want my system to behave, and it actually takes less fuss than with Ubuntu. I might be jumping ship on Ubuntu soon, especially if Fedora 11 is as solid as Fedora 10. I'm finding the transition to Fedora surprisingly smooth, as a good deal of what I learned in Ubuntu transferred over and the rest is just a quick Google search away.

How is the community?